Conservatism is a political and social term whose meaning has changed in different countries and time periods, but which usually indicates support for the status quo or the status quo ante. Cultural conservatism is a philosophy that supports preservation of the heritage of a nation or culture.
The political term conservative was coined by French politician Chateaubriand in 1819. In Western politics, the term conservatism often refers to the school of thought started by Edmund Burke and similar thinkers. Scholar R.J. White wrote: “To put conservatism in a bottle with a label is like trying to liquefy the atmosphere … The difficulty arises from the nature of the thing. For conservatism is less a political doctrine than a habit of mind, a mode of feeling, a way of living." Russell Kirk considered conservatism "the negation of ideology".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservativism
Psychopathology as a descriptive term
The term psychopathology may also be used to denote behaviors or experiences which are indicative of mental illness, even if they do not constitute a formal diagnosis. For example, the presence of a hallucination may be considered as a psychopathological sign, even if there are not enough symptoms present to fulfill the criteria for one of the disorders listed in the DSM.
In a more general sense, any behavior or experience which causes impairment, distress or disability, particularly if it is thought to arise from a functional breakdown in either the cognitive and neurocognitive systems in the brain, may be classified as psychopathology.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathology#Psychopathology_as_a_descriptive_term
Religious conservatism
Religious conservatives seek to apply the teachings of particular ideologies to politics, sometimes by proclaiming the value of those teachings, at other times seeking to have those teachings influence laws. Religious conservatism may support, or be supported by, secular customs. In other places or at other times, religious conservatism may find itself at odds with the culture in which the believers reside. In some cultures, there is conflict between two or more different groups of religious conservatives, each claiming both that their view is correct, and that opposing views are wrong.
Because many religions preserve a founding text, or at least a set of well-established traditions, the possibility of radical religious conservatism arises. These are radical both in the sense of abolishing the status quo and of a perceived return to the radix or root of a belief. They are ante conservative in their claim to be preserving the belief in its original or pristine form. Radical religious conservatism generally sees the status quo as corrupted by abuses, corruption, or heresy. One example of such a movement was the Radical Reformation within the Protestant Reformation and the later Restorationists of the 1800s. Similar phenomena have arisen in practically all the world's religions, in many cases triggered by the violent cultural collision between the traditional society in question and the modern Western society that has developed throughout the world over the past 500 years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_Conservatism#Religious_Conservatism
The inability to change over time usually leads to extinction. There are rare examples of organisms that have found an environmental niche that has remained unchanged for tens or even thousands of thousands of years and there by they have remained on this planet an unchanged life form.
Written religious texts or well-established traditions tend to be static as apposed to living documents. The conservation of the behaviors and beliefs that are based upon ideologies that were formed in the past promotes conflict. The disability that comes from irresolvable conflict is a social impairment that can lead to the death of the participants, without remorse on the radical conservatives’ part. This sounds like psychopathology to me.
Friday, December 12, 2008
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment