Conservatism appreciates science only for the certainties it can deliver

Conservatives are, among other things, very scared of the uncertainty of life. Rationality, logic, physics, these are the sciences of conservatism. At least, each of those sciences before the 20th and 21st Centuries.

The deeper and wider scientific inquiry explores, the more we are struck by the mind-boggling complexity and ever-changing quality of reality. The study of human rationality has exploded out into everything from behavioral therapy to cognitive sciences that test the bounded limits of rationality piped through human perception. Logical proof studies gave rise to lambda calculus and statistics, Bayesian reasoning, again more and more gradated than elementary logic. Physics famously exploded open with relativity and then string theory and quantum mechanics.

Throughout each of these scientific historical threads we see a maturation of mental models of the world which moves toward increasingly complexity, contingency, and uncertainty.

That is why, for the most part, only pre-modern scientific frames of thought are the bastions of conservatism. In especially the American conservative mind, to accept the world as emergent is in itself leftist, or at least liberal.

That is why, college campuses are scorned as "indoctrination camps". To study the world today is to accept it as contingent and emergent, which is not to be trusted, as it proposes an open-ended trajectory for the human project. And in that sense maybe the conservatives have stumbled onto the heart of the disagreement correctly: to reject the science of today is more often to reject its frame than its findings.

Because the frame of science now is one which acknowledges that everything we know is only an imperfect model of reality; that what we do with that flawed model can fundamentally change reality; that anything can happen; that there is no pre-written human story.