Quine a Conservative?

[Stone Island]

Edward Fesser writes,

Quine’s conservatism raises interesting questions about the relationship between a philosopher’s metaphysical commitments and his ethical and political commitments. It would be hard to deny that the sort of commonsense metaphysics associated with Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas had a bearing on the conservative character of their moral and political views, or that the radicalism of Marx’s social theory was at least in part a consequence of his brand of materialism. Yet while Quine’s metaphysical position was among the most radically revisionist of any that philosophers have produced – physicalist, behaviorist, eliminativist – his political views were, again, conservative.

He quotes Quine's Quiddities: An Intermittently Philosophical Dictionary, revealing his temperamental conservativism:

“Freedom to remodel society, gained by revolution, can be a delicate affair. Society up to that point, if stable at all, was stable in consequence of the gradual combining and canceling of forces and counter-forces, some planned and some not. The new and untested plan shares all the fallibility of the planner, this young newcomer in a complex world. Maybe the new order bids fair to overprivilege a hitherto underprivileged group; maybe it will presently prove to underprivilege all. It is delicate, and delicacy is seldom the revolutionary’s forte. The constraint imposed by social tradition is the gyroscope that helps to keep the ship of state on an even keel.” (p. 69)

 

[Skeptic]

It depends what you mean by "conservative". As a wise man who was a witness to the Communist and Fascist revolution(s) and their consequences, he was quite aware of the fatal flaw in the idea of destroying the old world in order to build a new, better one in its place. (As the Isaeli satirist Efraim Kishon said: "this social experiment had been partially succesful: the destruction is progressing pretty well.")

But not being a revolutionary and taking tradition and the existing order seriously is not the same as being a "conservative" in the sense of "voting republican in the elections". The vast majority of Democrats, no less than Republicans, are anti-revolutionaries in Quine's sense. The only self-proclaimed "revolutionaries" in the USA I know of are college students, some of their professors, and the lunatic fringe.