Dooyeweerd and the inadequacy of conservatism and progressivism

One of Abraham Kuyper's philosophical heirs was Herman Dooyeweerd (1894-1977), whose prolific writings are increasingly being translated into English, Portuguese, and other languages. One of his lesser known works is his Encyclopedia of the Science of Law, of which two volumes have thus far been published in English. Although Dooyeweerd was also an heir of Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer (1801-1876), whose analysis of the French Revolution owed much to that of Edmund Burke (1729-1797), Dooyeweerd was severely critical of conservatism in its many manifestations. This is from volume one of the Encyclopedia:

The historical norm of continuity, which we discovered in our preceding discussion, does not of itself give us a sufficient standard to establish the direction that God willed in his order of creation for the historical process of development. Moreover, when we established that the norm in question requires retaining the vital elements of the tradition to further the development of culture, this only brings out a biotic analogy in the modal structure of the historical aspect which, in its retrocipatory character (appealing to the nucleus of an earlier aspect), cannot of itself indicate a direction for the opening up of culture.

 

In itself, tradition can never function as the norm for historical development. It is only a subjective, historical-communal factor which embraces both good and bad elements. Those moments in the tradition, moreover, which are vital, and which are protected by sufficient historical power, do not provide any guarantee that they are amenable to further development in a truly disclosed historical process.

 

We require a criterion according to which the genuinely progressive course of historical development can be distinguished from the reactionary course. In our own time, the latter often initially masquerades as a development that strives in a forward-looking direction [emphasis mine].

This points to the limits of conservatism, which otherwise takes the form of a wise counsel of caution in embracing change, but which cannot offer a transcendent norm for assessing that change when it does occur. But it also underscores the inadequacy of progressivism, which is similarly incapable of identifying criteria for determining what is truly progressive and what merely cloaks its proponents' unnormed proclivities in the mantle of historical advancement.