Conservatives reject the Enlightenment elevation of reason over faith and tradition, and criticize any attempt to use theoretical reason (systematic, logical, and critical thinking) to improve human life. Self-evident and a priori standards of morals and ethics, such as natural rights, are seen as unworkable abstracta with no track record. It is better to be “realistic” and adopt institutional forms of domination and control from the past that are known to work, and to adopt our goals and from tradition and myth.

Conservatives see the attempt to rebuild society from rational standards as impracticable and utopian. Conservatism is the application of Realpolitik to one’s own tribe. Slavery, for example, is known to work as an engine for value production and social control. It is better to have a flawed but historically verified social order than to risk a Jacobin-style reset that ends in terror. For conservatives, the ideals that guide our social planning should be “practical”—they should derive from has “worked” in the past.

Yet conservatives do make use of an historically transcendent ideal—popular myth and the “natural law” that we can discern from it. Society should be moulded to conform with the ultimate reality and universal truths revealed by religion.

This includes, of course, a deep respect for absolute authority and command, which are the essential principles of religion and the bases of its origination. God helps those who obey him. An obedient society is blessed and a disobedient society is cursed. God also delegates authority, and this forms a hierarchy (even in heaven). The ideal conservative society is one where command trickles down from the divine hierarchy to the human one. A God-ordered society is efficient, harmonious, natural, and supported by God.

SUMMARY: Traditional conservatism favors the order and the authority of the traditional class system, a robust top-down system of government, and central planning, ideally originating in divine command and authority.