Conservative values -- the deep stuff

Around election time -- and in the USA it always seems to be election time -- we hear a lot of talk about "family values". Conservatives and Tea Partiers say the mainstream politicians and parties don't pay enough attention to the Christian family values that have made the West strong in the past. If only we could get back to those basic truths, they say, we could find a way out of the mess that is our 21st-century society.

Humanistic liberals take the other tack. Christian/family values, they argue, led to repression, persecution of minorities, ethnic cleansing, yada yada yada. The only social value they like is the ideal of the hippy-dippy 60s: if it feels good, do it!

Here's what Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper wrote in Report Magazine in 2003:
Conservatives would be well served by preserving historic values and moral insights on right and wrong. These are debates where modern liberals have no answers. They are trapped in their framework of moral neutrality, moral relativism and moral equivalence.

Lawrence Martin quotes this passage in Harperland (Viking Canada 2010), his excellent study of what makes "Call me Steve" tick. Martin opines that, although he has never said so publicly, Harper is almost certainly a Straussian -- a follower of the political philosophies of Leo Strauss.

Strauss (20 September 1899 – 18 October 1973) was a political philosopher who specialized in classical political philosophy. He was born in Germany to Jewish parents and later emigrated to the United States. He spent most of his career as a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, where he taught several generations of students and published fifteen books.

He is widely known for defending natural right, especially in its classical form, against the challenges of relativism and historicism, reopening the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns in political philosophy, emphasizing philosophy as a way of life, sharply criticizing value-free social science, and stressing the centrality of the theological-political problem.

There are conservative political philosophers other than Edmund Burke. This link will take you to the University of Chicago's Leo Strauss Center, where you can learn more about Leo's Strauss's thinking and teaching. Walt wishes that American politicians who want to lead the right would take a few seminars there, so they'd know what they're talking about!