Conservative is the wrong term for me and most people like me. We are anti-ideology, pro-empirical. If conservative meets those qualifications then it is a welcome descriptor.
In the Spring New Criterion, Paul R. Gross, a biologist does a wonderful review of Larry Arnhart’s Darwinian Conservatism. He summarizes the point of the book with a brilliant paragraph:
“evolution was and remains a body of empirical science and solid theory that displays and supports bedrock conservative principles. These include the inextricability of present and future from the past, the inevitability of variation in individuals and systems, differential survival of useful variations and the containment of damaging ones, and the omnipresent control of everything by environment, itself changing as its inhabitants change—in response to itself. There could not be a system of thought more opposed, Arnhart believes, to what radical utopianism has sought to bring into the world since 1860.”
On second thought, that sounds a great deal like Zen Buddhism. Why aren’t Zen Buddhists conservatives?