No, the problem is that conservatives think that things are working just fine when a liberal says it isn’t. If we though things were fine, we wouldn’t be trying to change things.
No one wants to fix something that they think is working fine, since there’s nothing there to fix.
And, of course, conservatives disagree that the change would actually be better, most of the time.
That’s actually a great example. Because while Galen’s theory about the four humours and the need to equalize them via bloodletting (also vomiting, pissing and, presumably, jerking the patient off) was understood to be a bunch of crap sometime around the 10th century or so ; doctors and barbers *still *routinely prescribed it all the way into the 19th - because it’s what had always been done, there wasn’t any better theory about how disease worked even if that one was demonstrably wrong, and people reckoned it was better do something just in case it worked than do nothing.
So there you go : nine fricking centuries of knowingly Doing It Wrong, courtesy of “it’s what we’ve always done”.
I shall have you know that today I asked my supervisor if it is very rude to tell someone who’s already received a response via IM and email but who insists in “going to voice” that sorry, that’s not possible. My supervisor’s response was “what for? much better in writing” and after looking at the ticket “the response is correct and you’re not his relative.”
Both supervisor and client happen to be from India.
And if you can’t do either, whine and grouse and shake your fist at change.
Perhaps, but some conservatives today would respond by saying “we tried it, it didn’t work, so now we need to go back to what did.”
Which is fundamentally silly. What worked in 19XX worked within the political, cultural, economic context of 19XX, be it at the global or local scale. Just because it worked then for reasons X, Y and Z and in correlation with factors A, B, and C doesn’t mean it’ll work today.
You can’t go home again.
Conservatives do not say that we need to go back to how it was. Reactionaries say that. Conservatives try to figure out what is not working and what can be done to make it better, or at least decreasingly bad. In doing so, actual conservatives debate with liberals/progressives to find the compromise that everyone is the least pissed-off about.
Do actual conservatives likewise debate, and compromise with, reactionaries?
You know why the Roman Catholic Church won’t let women be priests. This I can tell you in one word: TRADITION!!!
My goodness there are a lot of posts here! I should ask my questions on Straight Dope more often, such a wonderful community of intelligent people with different perspectives on the same topic. I truly appreciate every single one of your answers, it was quite the fascinating read!
I’ve posted this question on Quora as well, and I have read all of the answers both from them and you guys. I don’t know much about the political side like the Conservatives and Liberals, but what I understand is this.
It’s a gray area. There’s no one size fits all scenario because each scenario is different. Whether tradition or change is the best, depends on the situation.
With tradition, I remember watching an animal documentary. I can’t recall what the animal was, but the mother taught it’s children that there are two types of snakes in the area. One was poisonous, while the other was edible. The tell the difference, the children had to understand the differences of colored stripes between the two. Either the mother animal learned by watching another die from eating the poisonous snake or that it was taught at a younger age that those types of colored snakes were poisonous.
In regards to the definition of tradition, the behavior of not eating that certain snake, when the animal could of easily done so, had significance in the past and the present. I could be wrong though, cause I found this on Wikipedia 
With change, there’s human sacrifice. All the misfortunes under the sun, like epidemics, drought, etc, came from “angering the gods”. To appease them, we sacrifice someone from the village, preferably a virgin, by either throwing them into a volcano, bludgeoning them with stones, etc. If someone told them that it was an illness that can be cured with medicine, then hopefully, they would use medicine and not continue to sacrifice people.
Questions
Quick question about that part. If you had someone who knew that medicine would save their village, but still decides to sacrifice people to the gods, what would that be called? Someone who continues to hold their traditions even though they understand it’s wrong. Ignorance? Stubbornness?
If you explained it to them and they refuse to acknowledge what you said or they listen to you with closed ears, would that be been close minded?
Is the two sayings about fools, “never correct a fool because he’ll hate you”, and “never argue with a fool because you’ll always lose” really true then?
What sparked this question was I was talking to a fireman. He talked about how there were some outdated practices that needed to be changed to improve their productivity and safety. When he confronted his boss, or fire chief I assume, he told him that they’ve been using these same practices for 70 years, used by many other fire chiefs before him, including the chief he reported to when he first started.
Then proceeded to say that young people have this feeling of entitlement, “you’re lucky to have me”, kind of mentality and better stop with this nonsense. We’re paying you to do this job, not to question why we do this or that. I know it’s impossible to discuss against the paycheck, but I feel like it’s wrong not to ask questions. I don’t mean been aggressive or confrontational either, I mean just discussing about the topic and if there’s a better way, it could be a potential alternative.
Back to the fireman, this guy now is a real-estate investor who owns his own business. If he wanted to change something in his business, he could change it by tomorrow. Where trying to change something in the fireman profession would be incredibly difficult.
To me, in order to change something, you must have the power and control to do so. If you don’t, you’re wasting your time and energy.
Whew, went a little on a rant there! I apologize, but it’s just all so very interesting!
To the same extent that liberals debate and compromise with leftist radicals. Which is to say, no.
Well said, Mr. Insaneo.
(Huh. That’s a first for me.)
Reminds me of the urban legend about the artillery procedure: one soldier loads the gun while one soldier takes aim while one soldier stands off to the side with his fist out while one soldier prepares to fire, and – hang on a second: why do they have a soldier standing off to the side with his fist out? Well, because that’s how they were trained, by soldiers who – well, don’t know why, but were trained that way by soldiers who were likewise trained that way.
So they finally track down an old veteran and ask him, “But why did they start doing it?” And he casts his memory back to those long-ago days, and replies, “Well, someone had to hold the reins, didn’t he? I mean, horses spooked easy!”
“If two million people do a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.”
The artillery story reminds me of a similar story of how a mother taught her children to set the dinner table: knives on the right, forks on the left, except for the father of the house. Great-grandma finally had the answer: because her father was left-handed.
Turn the argument around on them. Ask so what if humans always did it this way, that just confirms tradition, it doesn’t speak to whether or not it was right. People who want to preserve a pointless tradition don’t do it because they feel its right, they do it because they want to continue the tradition. But randomly throwing darts onto a board of choices have an equal chance of hitting upon the right answer, or none at all if none of the choices are the best.
Plus with technology, anything we do in the past should automatically be scrutinized for whether its inefficient, dangerous, or pointless now that we have machines to automate things
And none of those new-fangled Clovis points.
One reason that institutions resist change is that everyone has to be trained to do things the new way and some people either don’t re-train worth beans or they’ve already retrained five times for this process and why bother getting used to doing it this way when number six is sure to be just around the corner. And any old guy in charge who hasn’t had to learn to do new things in awhile is going to be put off by the idea of younger, lower rank guys out-learning them.
Also there’s usually an equipment cost.
“And when it is said to them, ‘Follow what God has sent down,’ they say ‘No; but we will follow such things as we found our fathers doing.’ What? And if their fathers had no understanding of anything, and if they were not guided?”
—Qur’an 2:170
If you’re not religiously inclined to what God has sent down, you could substitute “Follow what science has found out,” and the principle of re-evaluating hidebound tradition in the light of new knowledge remains the same.
Well now that the notion that traditional methods are always better has been thoroughly debunked, I’m going to take a shot at rebunking it a bit.
I don’t know if this was the case with the firehouse, but often times inefficient traditional ways of doing things a kept on because the pain of getting everyone on board with doing things the new way is worse than the inefficiencies of the old way. A classic example of this is the QWERTY keyboard, which is inefficient,as compared to the DVORAK, since we no longer suffer from the jams that it was designed to prevent. But a young manager who came in and demanded that the keyboards of all of the support staff be changed to DVORAK because it’s more efficient would soon regret that decision.
Similarly a new more efficient way of, say coiling the hoses, might find that the added efficiency disappears as half of the staff does it the new way and the other half keeps doing it the old way out of either forgetfulness of laziness, resulting in total chaos.
It seems to me that the OP is putting the burden of proof on the wrong people.
IF it’s true that something has ALWAYS been done a certain way, the onus is on the reformer to demonstrate that change is called for.
This does NOT mean that the status quo is always right, merely that it deserves some respect. If YOU want to change a longstanding way of doing things, YOU’D better have a damn good reason.
Or, as the much smarter GK Chesterton put it:
***In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.