TAC: Ross Douthat

I suspect they would have been even more puzzled by the notion that a woman can vote. Or be a lawyer or a doctor. Or travel, internationally, while single, by herself. Yes, some women did work low-level jobs 100 years ago; today, the range of options available to women is much much much much much wider.

Your suspicions are in error. Suffrage was extended to women in the Wyoming Territory in 1869. (Where I grew up it was a live issue from at least 1872 onward, and had establishment support). The oldest of them was at that time six. Three of the four of them lived at times and places where they could have cast a ballot, as did two of their mothers.


As recently as thirty years ago, the sort of international travel aught but a few were likely to experience was had in the course of military service or immigration. It was seldom an option in the lives of people of any description, ca. 1910.

The range of options for anyone is broader than it was in 1910. The society is much farther from subsistence, the young finish their educations not at 13 but at 23, division of labor is such the number of occupations that might feasibly be followed is enormous, physical mobility is greater, and there are vigorous impersonal institutions which indemnify individuals against the vicissitudes of life. That is affluence, and its blessings have a price tag attached to them.>

What I observe from my tv and postings on b-net is that religious conservatives see human nature and human conditions as being changed from the outside. Man has fallen and is sinful, and things will not improve until Jesus comes and wipes those who don't hold certain beliefs off of the earth.


You might consider using a wider range of information sources than just "my TV and postings on b-net." It's certainly news to me that most religious conservatives are looking forward to when "Jesus comes and wipes those who don't hold certain beliefs off of the earth" but then again I don't watch a lot of TV.

But you are right about at least one point: religious conservatives (and non-religious traditionalists, of which there are more than you might think), are convinced that human nature is what it is. We have an obligation to seek the most just social order possible. But at the end of the day, no political program and no amount of "social change" will ever make human beings perfect.

All of us will always, to one degree or another, be attracted to certain behaviors that harm others -- driven by our greed, lust, envy, self-centeredness, etc. A just social order is one that minimizes such harms without unduly limiting freedom to be creative and pursue all of the good, beauty and truth to which all of us are also attracted. It's a balancing act, which requires constant exercise of the virtue of prudence.

The anti-conservative project, which assumes that human beings can be perfected over time with the right social/economic/political structures, destroys this balance and discards prudence altogether. From a conservative viewpoint, such efforts (whether imposed violently or democratically) are inherently vicious. They are based on a basic misunderstanding of the human person, and they will inevitably cause more harm than good.

The 20th century's extreme experiments in creating a "New Man" or "New Society" -- the USSR, Mao's China, Pol Pot's Cambodia, Hitler's Germany and a host of third world nasties -- certainly support the conservative critique. But in less dramatic ways, the slow but steady crackup of libertarian/social democratic society also supports it.>