The Marriage of Progressive and Conservative Values

Definitions

Conservative: Aversion to change or an inclination for stability.

Progressive: Inclination for change in the way of improvement.

Stability: tools, structures, concepts and systems being made with methods and materials that resist stress. 

Improvement: Repairing something that's broken or making things more efficient. 

Entropy: A measure of disorder in a system

Onslaught of Entropy

Everything in existence will always change with few exceptions, i.e. mathematical constants. There's no stopping the train of entropy. Trees will wither, mountains will erode, damaged DNA turns cells into cancer or dies, the sun will consume the earth in 4 billion years.

Certain changes are so small that we don't perceive them, and if their change isn't big enough to affect the purpose of that which we value, we can consider things to have remained the same. Other things require constant work to keep from changing and there are more ways for things to change for the worse than for the better.

Although the terms in question have political connotations, the concepts have value in everyday life.

Non-Political Context

When it comes to ladders, people tend to be conservative about the state of the ladder. We don't want the ladder to move or be wobbly for we can fall. The footholds require stable support, the steps need to have the integrity to hold your weight, the area under the ladder needs to be restricted from traffic, preferably someone should help hold the ladder in place. All of these values about the ladder are conservative in nature; we are averse to any changes in regards to the ladder while we're on it. 

In contrast, the very purpose of the ladder will be progressive in nature. Changing a broken light bulb or replacing it with a more efficient LED bulb, installing or replacing a high shelf, cleaning out gutters, fixing a roof leak, installing a swing. All are changes considered to be improvements from the perspective of the one doing the changes.

Interdependence

Progressive and Conservative values seem to be in service of each other. It is unwise to seek change without relying on things that must remain the same to make things happen, and we must continually improve things to avoid decay from entropy.

Additionally, these concepts build up on each other, they ratchet up. The bulb is fixed to bring things back to an unchanged state; the light it gives is as useful a tool as the steps on the ladder and its predictability as useful in bringing about further change elsewhere. The "ratchet" effects of these concepts' interdependence shows itself in something as simple as going up a flight of stairs: you make progress with each step and rely on the stability of the step that came before to take the next.

The Young and Old

Progress has a feature of diminishing returns. When first starting a project a lot of creativity, ingenuity and innovation can be implemented in many different ways or avenues, but as we get further along the available ways in which new ideas can be implemented diminishes and the number of achievements increase. These achievements, we are averse to having them change lest past progress is squandered. Eventually when the project is near completion, the only kind of progress to be made amounts to ironing out kinks to produce near perfect results.

Likewise, the long project of life retains these same patterns. The younger we are the more progress there is to be made, in learning how to use your body; to learning your native language; to learning the basics of living in society from school; to learning how to thrive in a competing world. In contrast, our achievements accumulate as the result of previous progress, and as we get older there is more reason to avoid change that might foil the fruits of our labor.

Knowledge Feeds Progress and Ignorance Feeds Fear of Change

When deliberating how to proceed with a project, understanding all the concepts, parts and rules related to the project will determine how successful things will turn out. When building a computer, understanding how much and what kinds of memory, cpu, motherboard, storage drives and where they go - or lacking such knowledge, being willing to put in the effort to research the subject - will determine whether one ends up with a working computer.

Though ignorance is a bad thing, the fear it can cause isn't, it can keep us from doing stupid things. The difference between courage and stupidity is caution and whether or not things go well as a result; the more ignorance one has about a subject the more aversion to change one should have. The problem manifests itself when people are unable or unwilling to educate themselves and won't trust others who are educated in the face of imminent change.

Politics

In politics there's a rift between progressives and conservatives because each will have different opinions about what government should be for and the divide grows when politicians create policies that primarily benefit their immediate supporters at the expense of society at large. 

The reason for the rift is two fold. One, there will be greater room for progress for the young and poor, and the young tend to also be poor because they haven't accumulated wealth; vise versa for the old & rich, there are fewer opportunities for progress to be made the older one gets and have many achievements and wealth to protect as the reason to avoid change. Two, politicians can be very inventive in the ways they avoid accountability, e.g. Gerrymandered districts reduce competition in politics and two-party elections limit the voter's choices.

This excerpt from the book "The Dictator's Handbook" shines light on Gerrymandering: 

"Gerrymandering is especially pernicious because it translates into two conflicting consequences. The average American is greatly dissatisfied with the job that Congress does and the average American is happy with his or her member of Congress. The latter is true because districts are constructed by politicians to give their preferred party a majority and so, by definition, the majority in any district is likely to be content. But this is a great perversion of governance. A small coalition of state legislators pick their voters instead of millions of voters picking their representatives. When politicians pick who votes for them it comes as no surprise that politicians are easily reelected and barely held accountable."

CGPGrey's playlist on Youtube, "Adventures in voting" has a list of great videos on how to make politics work for everyone. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUS9mM8Xbbw&list=PLqs5ohhass_RN57KWlJKLOc5xdD9_ktRg]

An educated population provides the most promise for closing the rift for it can allow people to be both politically conservative and progressive at the same time. With the educated young, they will have a greater opportunity to acquire wealth earlier in life, and with having achieved education and wealth, they will have more reason to be conservative to protect their achievements. With the educated old, they will have fewer reasons to fear change and will be more capable of making informed decisions on how to bring about improvements.

When a population consists of a mix of people of mostly equal conservative & progressive values that can't be easily divided and conquered, then politics turns into a competition for good ideas rather than one of popularity; so long as politics is constructed for politician's jobs to be competitive and for votes to have meaningful leverage.