The Philosphical Origins of the Left and Right, Part II

Steve Hayward continues the series of essays on the basis of the Left and Right by exploring how each deal with nature and convention.  Here is Hayward:

Conservatives harken to nature, especially human nature, which they we understand to be mostly fixed in important respects.  The relative fixity of human nature prescribes limits to human freedom and bounds to social structures.  These limits and boundaries are neither self-evident nor unchanging, but must be discovered, a slow process not easily understood or modified at will.  Conservatives see authority and tradition as guardians of hard-won knowledge—knowledge not always susceptible of explanation or restatement, whose origins are often half-forgotten or completely forgotten.

And on Liberals:

The starting point of liberalism offered here (individuals should be free to pursue their self-chosen purposes) leads liberals to challenge conventions that constrain individual autonomy—to “question authority” in the popular graffiti.  The logical consequence of the imperative to expand the domain of individual autonomy naturally compels liberalism to be reformist, to embrace progress as the essential process to accomplish reform, and to employ reason to guide the progressive reform process.  Above all, the imperative of individual autonomy necessarily places the principle of equality at the center of liberal thought.

In conclusion:

...conservatives use the term “ordered liberty” to distinguish a conservative perspective on individual freedom.  Thomas Sowell’s serviceable shorthand for this distinction between right and left (in his book Conflict of Visions) is the “constrained” versus “unconstrained” vision of how the world works.  At its purest or most extreme form, liberalism tends toward the belief that all or most constraints on humans are artificial and therefore illegitimate.  The conservative is not sure reform necessarily represents progress, and is doubtful in any case that progress or reform, however understood, can be produced primarily through reason.  

Another very crucial point that Hayward begins to develop in this essay in on the Declaration of Independence and how liberals and conservatives views that document.  Hayward notes that the Declaration of Independence "can be read as both a liberal and as a conservative document; the Declaration justifies revolution ('the right of the people to alter or abolish' forms of government) but also advises moderation ('Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes')."  I will leave more discussion about this until the next essay, but I will note on the outset that, rightly understood, American conservatism is different from any other form of conservatism in the world.