But a social world thick with traditions is also better than one where social authority crushes traditions into authorized shapes, as the Soviet Union once crushed civil society with all the weight its merciless centralized power could muster. The final component of conservative political morality, on Kekes view, is pessimism. Evil and contingency stain all human affairs, as should be clear to anyone who looks out the window or in the mirror. Yet conservatives don t go to the opposite extreme of viewing human nature as irredeemably corrupt. Even thoroughly evil societies witness acts of decency, generosity, and sacrifice, as the Maximilian Kolbes and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyns of the twentieth century attest.
Pessimism acknowledges both angel and brute in man s permanent constitution.
These four components of conservative political morality skepticism, pluralism, traditionalism, and pessimism apply flexibly to three different levels of the human world, Kekes contends. The universal level refers to certain minimal constants of human physiology, psychology, and sociality that all good societies must honor. If political arrangements make famine more likely, or cause people to despair of the future, or generate mistrust and worse among neighbors, then conservatives must condemn them. Finally, on the individual level, there are many different ways of living good lives, and conservatives should tolerate, though not necessarily respect, as much variety as is compatible with social stability. Much of this is indisputably wise, and conservatives of any stripe will have no hesitancy in endorsing it.